Old Romania – New Romania
The Ceanu Mare Festival and Competion is for carol singers. It is the only one of its kind in Romania. This fifth year it attracted contestants from as many as 8 counties and as far afield as Constanta, on the other side of the country.
Ceanu Mare (literally “Big Pot”) is a hill-top village of no more than a few hundred families in Transilvania. How do the inhabitants of such an isolated community manage to accomplish an event of such national importance in contemporary Romania?
The Ceanu Marea carol festival is indeed a model of community effort in present-day Romania. It is also an instructive example of today’s clash of cultures between the old, authoritarian, communist Romania and the emerging, community led initiatives of a more democratic, modern Romania.
The Ceanu Mare Carol Festival is the brainchild and sole initiative of a local school-teacher, 55 year-old Istvan Czekely (pronounced “Sekei”), a man so modest that at the prize-giving I attended he could not be found. The contestants themselves pulled him out from behind the cramped community-center stage to shouts of applause from 500+ assembled children, parents, local residents and pupils: “Szekely, Szekely, Szekely, Szekely….”
The hub of the festival’s organization is the village school, where Isvan Czekely teaches. The school building has been transformed into a massive canteen with local mums tend huge pots of goulash and sarmale, local specialities in this multicultural Romanian – Hungarian region, and enough for the assembled 500. This is the time of the year when families slaughter a pig or two anyway, and so there is plenty of food to go around. In many a yard here, the men of the household can be seen burning the bristle off their Christmas dinner – a feast of cuts from every part of the beast, including kidneys, liver, toba (a sort of brawn), and spicy caltabosi (pronounced “caltabosh”) and other tasty sausages.
The school’s young director, special needs teacher Nicolae Petruta and his fiancée, fellow teacher Ioana Bocos, this year masterminded sponsorship for the event, attracting heavyweights such as ProCredit Bank, a Romanian bank backed by the EBRD and Germany’s Commerzbank, and putting the school and its staff at the Festival’s disposal.
The local authority has not put in a penny, but as so often happens here, at the festival prize-giving, the mayor now takes all the credit. Mayors, after all, are elected officials and elections are due in 2008. Since school directorships are still political posts here, Nicolae Petruta has to bite his tongue or risk losing his job. The money prizes the mayor hands out at the festival’s closing session are not even his to distribute either – they are funded by the local Casa de Cultura, the local offshoot of the Ministry of Culture. But here, in a typical Transilvanian village, the mayor still reigns supreme.
Apart from this small money contribution by the Casa de Cultura, everything else is a community effort: 300+ carol-singers and their chaperones are all housed in village homes. Food from the village has been pooled for central preparation and meals service in the village school. Programs, flyers, lapel-badges and prizes have all been sponsored by local businesses (some whom obtained by the Ratiu Family Foundation). Such community efforts as these are rare indeed in present-day Romania. And those who attempt them can usually expect obstruction rather than support from their local authority, because, as one local mayor proudly announced to me: “Nothing happens in this community unless I say so”.
Such is the success of the Ceanu Mare Carol Festival that other traditional artists are also attracted these days, performing in a kind of “Fringe” to the main event during program breaks and at mealtimes: traditional instruments, ancient renderings of traditional Christmas themes and national costumes are all featured here, as well as exhibitions of icons and collages.
Over an hour passes while we are entertained to still more sarmale as well as coffee and cakes in the school director’s office. In the school visitors’ book I write: “How good it is to remember that God came to earth as a child, so that we might come to Him”.
Then his deputy bursts in: “Domnul Director….We have to get the jury into the hall. They have been deliberating for over two hours now and the children are getting impatient”. The deputy is dispatched to fetch in the jury while we make our way over to the village hall, where there are rhythmic shouts of “Jury, Jury, Jury, Jury…..”, and a burst of applause as we enter a space packed so tight that children appear to be hanging off the walls and the ceiling…
Although not a member of the jury, I make a short speech recognizing those who have traveled furthest (applause), and thank the organizations who have given the prizes we have brought today, in particular Turda’s Potaissa Cooperative whose Christmas globes sell as far afield as the USA. I make things short because these kids want results and prizes….not long speeches (which were yet another feature of communist life).
And the prize-giving begins: delegates from each group struggle up to the stage to collect stacks of wooden “treasure houses” from the Potaissa Cooperative and sacks full of Christmas goodies, all sponsored by local businesses. A neighbour of ours from Turda, whose family own land here and a former Orthodox priest now ministering again according to the Greek-Catholic rite of his ancestors, both help me with the distribution. We have 98 prizewinners to satisfy.
But night is beginning to fall. The road home will be freezing over. So I leave my two deputies to complete the distribution, bid my farewell to Director Petruta and Prof. Czekely, and struggle to the door amidst a crowd of smiling faces. The biggest prize of all is still to come and these proceedings look set to go on until late…
Outside, laden with gifts of this season’s jams: quince, apricot, rose-hip and plum, we clamber into our van. The snow-plough has just passed through, leaving a swathe of sand every 20 meters. Everything else is white with freshly fallen snow, except for the outlines of the roadside nut trees and haphazard, drunken-looking telegraph poles. As we drive gingerly back down to Turda, our headlamps pick out a flock of goats out in the road ahead. Further on, a flock of sheep, mounds of yellow wool against the snow with their shepherd indistinguishable from his sheep, except for his black hat and stave.
